School libraries are ubiquitous in American education today yet historians have rarely studied their early development. Their roots lie in the nineteenth-century local and state history. This article uses a variety of archival and secondary sources to explore the history of school libraries in North Carolina during this formative period of the state's past. It also situates this history in terms of national library and school development and forms a model for the study of school libraries. The

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... vents and developments in North Carolina are illustrative but not identical with those in other states.